Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

With that information in hand by eight P.M., agents from the Little Rock office of the FBI obtained a search warrant and journeyed out to Blue Eye, cut through the padlocks at his property and examined his trailer and the contents of his life with a great deal of care.

There, they found even more incriminating evidence – maps, drawings, sketches and notes of the four cities in which the president of the United States was scheduled to speak in the months of February and March, with diagrams of the speaking sites. The notes were particularly damning: “Wind, how much wind?” Bob had written. “What time best to shoot?” Bob had wondered. “What range? Go for a long shot, or just try and get up close?” And, “.308?.50? What about some sort of.308-.50?” They also found ticket stubs and hotel receipts indicating that he’d traveled to all four cities, and other teams of agents quickly verified his presence in each. And finally, they found a Barr & Stroud rangefinder, for calibrating the exact distances between shooter and target, an invaluable aid for any sniper.

They also found thirty-two rifles in his gun vault and seventeen handguns, and an empty space where the Remington 700 had rested before he removed it for his trip to New Orleans, and over ten thousand rounds of ammunition.

And they found one other sad thing, much remarked upon in the press for many weeks: lying in a shallow grave, the body of Bob’s dog Mike, his brain blown out with a 12-gauge shotgun, because, as the senior agent in charge told NBC news, “He knew he probably wasn’t coming back and there was no one to take care of Mike, who was probably the only creature Bob loved in this world.”

On the issue of the dog, there was one demurral, from Bob’s friend the old ex-prosecutor and war hero Sam Vincent, who never for a second believed Bob had taken the shot, and who had once helped Bob sue Mercenary magazine.

“I’ll tell you this,” he said to the newsmen who had tracked him down. “Whoever done this thing to Bob did a good job. He framed him, he took his reputation from him, he made him an outlaw and the most hated man in America or the world. And he’s got you boys putting your lies about him in your magazines and newspapers and on the TV. Well, I tell you, he done a good job, but he made one mistake. He killed Bob’s dog. Well, around these parts, we consider our dogs family. And that makes it personal .”

This quaint bit of Arkansas lore made the evening news, but nobody paid it much attention because nobody wanted to get into the bitter old man’s delusions.

Other witnesses were located to discuss the phenomenon that had become Bob Lee Swagger. His father’s legendary heroism was hauled out of the files, and his father’s death on U.S. 67 the night of July 23, 1955, as a sergeant in the Arkansas State Police and one of Arkansas’s seven Medal of Honor winners from the Second World War. A number of old Arkansas salts who knew both men made television news appearances.

“Hard to b’lieve a son of Earl Swagger’s could end up like this,” they said to a man. “He was one of the bravest, fairest, most decent men to ever walk the face o’ the earth. We-all thought Bob was a true-blue type too, but you can’t never tell how a boy’s gonna turn out.”

A few ex-Marine snipers who’d served with Bob were located; only one would go on television and say “interesting” things – and only with the proviso that his face not be shown. He was now an automobile salesman.

“Bob was just a great shot but he had the coldness,” the man said, “the coldness of heart that makes a killer. Of all of us, and there were over fifty men rotated in and out of that platoon over the three years it was operational, he was certainly the best. But as far as I know, we all went back to civilian lives convinced we’d served our country as well as we could. And most of us readjusted.”

The man went on to detail his own psychic difficulties with living with his own evil, his own fascination with violence. He’d been in and out of programs, he said, had a long history of alcoholism and only just lately had gotten his life together again. Later, when it was determined he was a fraud, the story ran only on Entertainment Tonight .

On the third day, the ballistics report was issued by the FBI. It began with the bad news that the bullet – which had mushroomed considerably as it plowed through bone and brain, then veered free and struck something hard, perhaps a nail in the podium – was unreadable as to its rifling marks. However, preliminary results of tests on the bullet’s metallic structure via a neutron activation analysis revealed that it matched perfectly with traces of copper residue found inside the Hart stainless steel barrel on Bob’s Remington action. Two partial fingerprints were lifted from inside the weapon’s barrel channel; from Marine Corps records, they were quickly verified as Bob’s. The empty shell found on the floor had indeed been fired in the chamber of the Remington; all its marks corresponded exactly to the markings of the chamber. The shell itself probably came from an order of brass -.308 Winchester Match Nickel Plated, Lot No. 32B 0424, manufactured by the Federal Cartridge Company, Anoka, Minnesota – which Bob had purchased, mail order, from Bob Pease Accuracy in New Braunfels, Texas. The matching shells, some loaded, some yet untouched, were found in his workshop.

And last, there was the letter. Poignant, desperate, awkward and naive, it swiftly became the most famous letter in American culture: Bob telling the president he wants the Congressional Medal of Honor because he’s earned it. It was the letter that got him on the Secret Service’s Charlie list, and had not an idiotic FBI agent blown the assignment, it was the letter that might have saved a man’s life. But there it was, the crucial issue of motive.

In all this, there was not one public doubt raised about the guilt of Gunnery Sergeant (Ret.) Bob Lee Swagger, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, in the matter of death by gunshot in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 1. That was finally uttered, for the first time, on the fourth day, when a reporter from WKNU-TV finally tracked down Mrs. Susan Swagger Preece, of Highland Junction, North Carolina, who had once been married to Bob Lee Swagger and was now the wife of a hardware store owner.

She was a bitter little woman, her face almost completely concealed under a headscarf and sunglasses. The reporter caught her rushing from her husband’s Cadillac toward his lawyer’s office.

No, she had no idea where Bob was, and doubted very much, if he was alive, if he’d try to make contact with her. That was all over, she said, and life was too short to be involved with Bob Swagger more than one time.

But she had a last thought.

“I’ll say this, though,” she said, turning for just a second, “if Bob Lee Swagger took it in his mind to fire a bullet at the president of the United States, then the president of the United States would be a dead man, and not no Salvadoran archbishop. You’re telling me Bob Swagger aimed at a man and missed and killed another man? Bob Lee Swagger never missed nothing he aimed at his whole life and that’s the Pure-D truth.”

Millions of people saw it within minutes. But Nick Memphis did not see it for three days, and then only by accident.

He was at hub center of the Swagger manhunt in FBI headquarters, going through leads, keeping his head down in the seething atmosphere of the place now so totally locked into finding the sniper that it seemed unable to pay attention to some smaller details…such as himself. But he knew Mother Bureau would get around to it. He knew the inevitable could not be avoided, and that he was riding in a bubble of illusion. The ax would fall. On him. Soon.